I do hope so

I read somewhere last week that Scott Walker was meeting with President Trump to discuss union-busting. Mike Gecan opines in the New York Daily News that the President's opponents are making the same mistakes that Walker's did:

The Trump team is following the Walker playbook, with some variations. Like Walker, it is running aggressive plays right from the start. It doesn’t have to feel out the opponents’ soft spots and tendencies. It knows them.

The difference is that it isn’t just running one play. It’s running a series of them, one right after the other, to keep the defense confused and on its heels.

Second, it’s counting on the opposition to fall into the same trap that the Wisconsin opposition did — to rely on massive demonstrations and to ignore the need to do hard, local, person-by-person organizing back in the local towns, villages and counties.

Trump doesn't seem like a guy who loses sight of the difference between showy and effective actions. If he's showy, it's because he expects to achievable an effect. I supported Walker in the primaries because he'd mastered tactics to achieve his goals, and I was so tired of D.C. Republicans who couldn't seem to navigate their way out of a closet, if indeed they genuinely cared about the goals they claimed to be pursuing. Trump turns out to share a lot of my goals, to my enormous surprise, and I look forward to his implementing them systematically, while his opponents mistake squawking and violence for persuasion and the pursuit of concrete influence.

3 comments:

Protests are fun. They give a sense of progress, of solidarity, and they make a big splash on TV you can feel good about. Those who lost the last election have experienced a sudden, tectonic shift of power loss. They need something to feel good about, and something to give them hope and a sense that it's not all going to fall apart.

One hopes they don't trash too many storefronts while comforting themselves. I do understand the impulse: it heartened me greatly to see the Tea Partiers protest in 2010. I also hope the marches satisfy the currently disaffected citizens' entire need for action, and that President Trump can get on with his agenda, as Gov. Walker did. The last thing I want to see is for them to channel all this energy into developing a crop of credible candidates for the 2018 elections.